Editorials/The French Forget/If You Can Read This
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S .......................................................................................................................................................................... THE...
...Census Bureau, fully 14 percent of the adults living within our borders are illiterate, at least in English...
...I thought this rather a good answer to a getting-to-know-you question...
...They cite frequent European abandonment of us when we needed them and call for an end to our participation in NATO...
...Richard Brookhiser of National Review...
...They took no interest at all in our material possessions, a lot of interest in the printed matter we brought with us...
...Nonetheless, they live contentedly, sustained by trust funds and by papa...
...The customs inspection of our group was wholly ideological...
...Ask yourself: why lament that 14 percent ofmore exposed to terrorists today, experience shows that they will be still more exposed tomorrow...
...Not on that occasion...
...The fact is that no one should besurprised by the high rate of illiteracy in the Republic...
...In French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's remarks after the attack there was just a hint that he recognized this...
...MacArthur had the doleful eyes of a basset hound and the high balding dome of his famous uncle...
...Of course, the spokesman who broke the news for the Census Bureau was nearly disconsolate...
...Larry Moffitt said he had never seen an Intourist guide hassle an immigration official...
...a lonely road with a lonely truck...
...Ambassador, we'll die together...
...No," he said, "I went to Moscow in August, 1939, with -a letter from Roosevelt to Stalin...
...0 our fellow Americans cannot possibly read the journalists' reports of calamities, impending calamities, or calamities narrowly missed...
...Both Richard Grenier and Ernie Lefever had been in Moscow at the time of the Khrushchev' thaw...
...When the leaders of the French government flinched from allowing American warplanes to fly over French territory en route to Qaddafi's Libya, thus condemning American airmen to all the dangers attendant with a military mission now made 2400 miles more arduous, they showed their smallness...
...The tour was arranged and paid for by News World Communications, the organization that founded the Washington Times and the New York Tribune...
...Perhaps our illiterates are not as well endowed, but they have access to all the state's charitable programs...
...Jensen, our Camel-smoking Marlboro Man, had been the Associated Press's correspondent in 1969 but was thrown out for "activities hostile to socialist construction...
...Officials made off with Nolan's copy of David Shipler's in-nocuous book Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams and promised to return it in Moscow (but did not...
...For one he published an interview with Vladimir Bukovsky...
...Doug, as we took to calling him, acted as our unofficial chief of protocol, toastmaster, and speechmaker...
...Qaddafi and like-minded Middle Eastern dictators have made it a matter of policy to murder innocents, even those who have had nothing whatsoever to do with government or politics...
...Alas, Mr...
...Thee, an illiterate cannot avoid modem architecture or modern art in public places...
...Reason conduces to the conclusion that it is both moral and prudent to do today what will with greater difficulty have to be done tomorrow...
...I doubt it...
...Among those also making the trip with us were: Martin Nolan, the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe...
...In this country those of us who defend NATO are sorely pressed by others...
...We know that 42 percent earned practically nothing the year before they were tested...
...We were free at any time to leave the tour, and many of us did so...
...Ambassador...
...a winding river...
...Ambassador to Iran and Japan, now retired from the foreign service...
...journalist emeritus Clark Mollenhoff...
...Then we shall simply bury our dead under American skies...
...The air quality (aviation fumes, grit, and smoke) in the depressing gray terminal building would not have satisfied EPA...
...Fortune has kissed these unlettered Yanks on both cheeks...
...They also took from my briefcase a Mid-Atlantic Research Associates report on Yurchenko (the re-defector), but let through (with a second glance) a book by Tom Bethel...
...All contain military cemeteries where American men lie face up, forever gazing into the skies of France Surely these men would not object if they were to see once more the underbelly of an Adapted from RET's weekly Washing-ton Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Olga, our Intourist guide, a member of the Communist party, watched noncommittally...
...But I wander...
...These values will always offend dictators whether they are the authors of Mein Kampf, the Green Book, or whatever other collection of claptrap esotery they compose to warrant their lusts...
...Church, he was a veteran of two earlier Soviet tours...
...As Westerners grew more "reasonable" Qaddafi grew more horrible...
...I have the gravest doubts that novelists such as John Irving and Robert Coover would pass the Census Bureau's test...
...This from In-tourist guides who have defected...
...Olga seemed to belong in a spy movie...
...DAS KAPITAL IDEAS There were twenty of us in the Finnair lounge (JFK), beginning our ten-day, three-city tour of the Soviet Union: Leningrad, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Moscow, in that order...
...President Charles de Gaulle did not...
...Carelessness and vulgarity characterize most American writing whether it be journalism or fiction...
...All the arguments for avoiding our military action against Qaddafi have been heard before...
...This species of terrorism is a new abomination in the annals of war...
...We had heard that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was about to be signed...
...A few of us had already been to the Soviet Union...
...James, St...
...Further research will doubtless show that these illiterates live longer, have better digestion, and see shrinks less frequently than many other reputedly better-educated groups in our society...
...Leningrad Airport's cracked and rutted runway would scarcely have passed FAA inspection...
...But we were too late...
...In the pinch Prime Minister Thatcher displayed nobility, these Frenchmen revealed flawed character...
...Many undoubtedly are college graduates...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S...
...Our attack on Libya was but another chapter in the defense of our civilization...
...It should have been made by an international force composed of the major victims of Middle Eastern terror...
...Dixy Lee Ray, former governor of Washing-ton State and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission...
...Those social scientists who con-ducted the Census Bureau's literacy test might, upon further research, find that these illiterates lead satisfied lives...
...She spoke good English and kept a comradely eye on us throughout our tour...
...Washington Times foreign editor Holger Jensen...
...see little more than a desolate terrain...
...of homilies by Msgr...
...Customs was an ordeal...
...is The American Spec- looked below for signs of life but could tator's Washington correspondent...
...Arnold Beichman, former newspaperman and professor, now a columnist affiliated with the Hoover Institution...
...At first I thought it might be a put-on, but he was quite serious...
...Laurent, and Epinal...
...Poor Olga was forever filling out duplicate forms with little bits of carbon paper, and I believe at night she filled out more that we never saw—about us...
...In October 1962, when the United States squared off against the Soviet Union and risked nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wavered upon receiving President Kennedy's call...
...We recognize that some Europeans have profited in commerce with him...
...I said yes and asked the same question of Douglas MacArthur, former U.S...
...Uniformed guards leafed slowly through two news-magazines I had brought along, pausing to scrutinize photos of the USS Saratoga in the Gulf of Sidra...
...If they are indeed Oh happy few...
...An interview with Jeane Kirkpatrick, reproduced from Encounter, was solemnly transported away to some higher authority, along with my passport, and returned half an hour later with grudging approval...
...Which is not to assume that the Census Bureau's 14 percent did not include a few soi disant sophisticates...
...No suburban development as we understand that phrase...
...Did Hitler or Stalin in times of ostensible peace as readily resort to the random murder of innocents as do the Middle East's enemies of Western democracy...
...American bomber flying far from home to defend the values of the West...
...Neither the writ-ten word nor the printed word is ac-corded much admiration here nowadays...
...It is a lovely irony that as higher education spreads so does disdain for the educated mind...
...And, inIF YOU CAN READ THIS .. . to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 cidentally, considering the literacy of those rich heirs whom I know, the Census Bureau's 14 percent must include plenty of gilded idlers...
...THE FRENCH FORGET R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...In the end political resolve comes down to a question of character...
...Many rich heirs and heiresses are unemployed and earn nothing...
...Qaddafi's kind of far-flung violence is a threat to the moral order established by the West over decades...
...Yet, quite possibly the gloom of the Census Bureau spokesman is unwarranted...
...The leader of the group was Larry Moffitt, a 36-year-old Texan with a ready repertoire of laconic phrases...
...When I arrived the pact had just been signed...
...The regime of Colonel Qaddafi has been a criminal regime It might have carried on commerce with Western Europe and other civilized countries, but in the more important province of moral values it has been hostile to all that they stand for and have stood for during the better part of modern times...
...Did you meet Stalin...
...Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and the rest of the vacuous Minimalists would probably score about as well as Prince, which brings to mind the herds of morons who inhabit the world of celebrity and pop entertainment...
...Richard and Cynthia Grenier...
...Even university professors often speak in the argot of the slob...
...Ernie Lefever of the Ethics and Public Policy Center asked me if it was my first trip...
...But that is hardly a cause for alarm...
...It is apparent that some were more exposed to his cowardly terrorists than were most Americans...
...Better than that, they are not obliged to suffer through any of the incondite stuff published in this great Republic, not the unreadable poetry, the tedious novels, the journalism, the advertisements, the public relations drivel...
...Josemaria Escriva...
...Anyone who watches the television talk shows realizes that most of these patheticos are subverbal and, what is more, incapable of tasteful dress...
...and your managing editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski (see p. 56...
...It would be helpful to know how many of them graduated with honors or went on to pursue advanced degrees...
...She wore a maroon pork pie hat, high boots to match, and belted raincoat with collar turned up...
...When Kennedy's emissary, Dean Acheson, sought his cooperation the Frenchman replied, "If there is a war, France will be with you...
...My guess is that in terms of longevity, comparative health, marital condition, criminal records, and all the other indices of well-being our illiterate 14 percent are doing quite well, freed as they are from the terrors of modern American sophistication...
...Establishing the hierarchies of command, the recognition of who is subordinate to whom, must be one of the most difficult tasks in establishing a Communist state...
...The Boston Globe paid for Marty Nolan...
...By being denied the printed word this blessed 14 percent might be one of the few groups in America that sees the world as it is, and with a greater appreciation of culture...
...But the fact remains that he has been a firebrand whose record is one of ever-growing belligerency, violence, and cruelty...
...It will not be the last...
...A member of Rev...
...Goodbye, Mr...
...According to a recent report from the U.S...
...There have been times when French leaders have shown the requisite readiness...
...The Bureau's literacy test was of the multiple-choice variety, and to miss the correct answers one had to be as ignorant of the English language as Colonel Qaddafi is of the finger bowl...
...Roosevelt wanted to dissuade Stalin because he knew it meant war...
...Not even Mussolini showed such savagery...
...That would be a good omen...
...I wonder if they would have allowed our planes to fly over a more precisely designated route, leapfrogging such places as Ardennes, Suresnes, Rhone, the Lorraine Valley, St...
...Sun Yung Moon's Unification As we circled above Leningrad I Tom Bethel...
...The study reveals that of the native English-speakers 70 percent did not finish high school...
...and when Soviet Ambassador Serge Vinogradov belabored him with warnings that he risked the nuclear destruction of France, de Gaulle broke a stony silence, rose from behind his desk in the Elysee Palace, extended a hand in farewell, and said "Mks, Monsieur lAmbassmdarr, nags mourirons ensemble/ Au revoir, Monsieur I'Ambassodeur...
...The Europeans who expressed disapproval of Washington's strike against Qaddafi must face the grisly fact that as they prospered in commerce with this brute they contributed to the destruction of the humane values of their civilization...
...What of the remaining 30 percent...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 11...
...Thus, they are the fortunate possessors of an absolutely impregnable excuse for never reading the New York Review of Books...
...Graceful expression is infrequent in our public forums, and when it does appear it is often scorned as pretentious or insufficiently democratic...
...In the course of my literary duties I must read many new books, and I can testify that many of the Republic's illiterates are proof-readers and more are authors...
...but, remote from the modern novel, he need never learn to hate literature...
...Against savagery civilization will always need leaders who stand ready...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
